Black Spring by Alison Croggon

smile: even at ten years old, Lina’s sense of entitlement was a kind of enchantment in itself, persuading others to see her as she saw herself. There was much jostling among the peasants, because everyone wanted to get a sight of the witchborn daughter of the master, and she knew it too, and played up to it.
    After the necessary speeches, which seemed to my mind quite unnecessarily long, we went up to the Red House. I think I fell in love with it at once because, even though it was small, it reminded me of the home we had left behind. The master’s grandfather had built it to please his southern wife, a delicate lady from the city who, so the story runs, quickly withered in the harsh plains and was carried away by the consumption in only a few short years. He bought the estate in the South when she was in her illness and moved there hoping she would recover, but by then it was already too late. Some still whisper that it was back then that the rot set into the Kadar family. Black Country people do not trust southerners, begging your pardon; they consider them dishonest, weak, and immoral, since they do not live by the Lore.
    My master’s father did much to rescue the family reputation, and lived an unexceptionable life. He married a hard northern woman who ruled the household with a hand of iron and had no truck with any southern fripperies. She moved the principal household to the manse, where Damek lives now, but she kept a canny eye on the accounts and, for all her disapproval of the South, didn’t sell the profitable southern estate.
    So my family were to live in the Red House, caring for Lina, and here too was the master’s residence; the rest of the household was to move to the manse and run the estate from there. There was much coming and going between the two households in those days.
    One difference from our southern home I noticed right away, and it brought home to me more than anything else that we were in a place of unknown perils: every threshold was crowned with iron, and above every window was a sprig of rowan. It was, my mother told me, to keep out evil spirits, and because of the way she said it, I felt a run of goose bumps trickle down my spine.
    I didn’t have to wait long for my first sight of a wizard. The next morning there was a hammering on the front door, as if someone were beating it with a stick, which was in fact the case. I was in the kitchen with my mother and the cook, peeling turnips for luncheon, and I remember my mother started and dropped her knife. She must have known at once who it was, must in fact have been expecting it, and my father was out in the fields and the master not yet come. She stood up, gathering her skirts around her, and went to answer the door. She didn’t forbid me to follow, which I am certain she would have done if she had not been so distracted, and I was alive with curiosity, so I dogged her heels through the hallway and peeked out from behind her as she opened the door. I’m sure my eyes were as round as saucers.
    Outside stood a tall man who looked at first just like an ordinary highland shepherd: he wore a thick jerkin of unwashed wool and leggings of leather, and his rifle was slung across his back. The only signs of his vocation were the stout blackthorn staff that he carried, and the starveling boy who stood silently beside him, so pale and thin I thought he must be ill, and, despite the cold weather, dressed in rags through which his skin showed white. I stared at the strange pair and clutched my mother’s hand, at which point she noticed I was there. She reached behind her to give me a slap, for my cheek.
    “Greetings,” she said. “The Wizard Ezra, is it?”
    “Aye.” The man lifted his head and met her eyes, and I felt my mother flinch. I couldn’t stop looking at his face, which was as harsh and craggy as the mountains themselves: he had a nose like the beak of an eagle and skin the color of walnuts, weathered by wind and rain and sun, and a